Gollum's Sacredness and the Geopolitics of the Self: Reframing Tolkien's Normative World
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Cristina Costantini
Cristina Costantini is Researcher of Private Comparative Law at the University of Bergamo. She is member of AIDC (Associazione Italiana di Diritto Comparato), AIDEL (Associazione Italiana di Diritto e Letteratura), Selden Society (Faculty of Law, Queen and Westfield College, London), ESSE (The European Society for the Study of English) and AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica). Her main fields of research are the history of English legal system; the construction of legal traditions; the intellectual assessment of the liminal thresholds within Humanities (Law and Literature; Law and Philosophy; Law and Religion). Among her most recent publications: “Representing Law. Narrative Practices, Poetic Devices, Visual Signs and the Aesthetics of the Common Law Mind” inLiminal Discourses , eds. D. Carpi and J. Gaakeer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 27–36; “The Keepers of Traditions. The English Common Lawyers and the Presence of Law,”Comparative Law Review (2010): 1–12; “Estallido de la Equidad. Politica como Justicia” inPersona, Derecho y Libertad. Nuevas Perspectivas. Escritos en Homenaje al profesor Carlos Fernandez Sessarego , eds. C.A. Calderon Puertas, M.E. Zapata Jan, C. Agurto Gonzales (Lima: Motivensa Editoria Juridica, 2009), 965–978;La Legge e il Tempio (Roma: Carocci, 2007).
Abstract
This paper aims to construe Gollum's identity according to a new paradigm in light of the most recent studies in bio-politics and bio-law. Reframing Tolkien's narrative economy, at the intersection between metaphysical views and normative visions, it is of particular interest to investigate Smeagol's corporeal metamorphosis associated to its causes and effects. The departure from the old creature and the subsequent transformation into a disgusting and progressively hybridized being is grounded upon an original act of violence, the murderous plan against Deagol, which repeats Cain's homicidal behaviour. The new life after the former sin (both for the ancestor Cain and for his literary heirs, such as Beowulf's Grendel and Tolkien's Gollum) not only corrupts the primary features, but also necessitates or exacts a new identity and a different nomos. Gollum – as his ancestor Cain – is an outcast, banished from his own community, from his natural space and consigned to a Land of wandering. Moving from these arguments, the essay intends to qualify Gollum as a homo sacer, in the specific philosophical meaning given to the archaic figure of Roman Law by Giorgio Agamben. The original intellectual framework, which supports the present analysis inspired by the concrete shape of a literary character, is consequently devoted to investigate the determination of sacredness and the concept of geopolitics; the hermeneutics of the Self and the spatial architecture of ontologies; the geography of identity and the foundation of sovereignty.
About the author
Cristina Costantini is Researcher of Private Comparative Law at the University of Bergamo. She is member of AIDC (Associazione Italiana di Diritto Comparato), AIDEL (Associazione Italiana di Diritto e Letteratura), Selden Society (Faculty of Law, Queen and Westfield College, London), ESSE (The European Society for the Study of English) and AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica). Her main fields of research are the history of English legal system; the construction of legal traditions; the intellectual assessment of the liminal thresholds within Humanities (Law and Literature; Law and Philosophy; Law and Religion). Among her most recent publications: “Representing Law. Narrative Practices, Poetic Devices, Visual Signs and the Aesthetics of the Common Law Mind” in Liminal Discourses, eds. D. Carpi and J. Gaakeer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 27–36; “The Keepers of Traditions. The English Common Lawyers and the Presence of Law,” Comparative Law Review (2010): 1–12; “Estallido de la Equidad. Politica como Justicia” in Persona, Derecho y Libertad. Nuevas Perspectivas. Escritos en Homenaje al profesor Carlos Fernandez Sessarego, eds. C.A. Calderon Puertas, M.E. Zapata Jan, C. Agurto Gonzales (Lima: Motivensa Editoria Juridica, 2009), 965–978; La Legge e il Tempio (Roma: Carocci, 2007).
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Focus: Genealogies of Laws and Justices
- Modifying the Past: Nietzschean Approaches to History
- Weeds in the Gardens of Justice? The Survival of Hyperpositivism in Polish Legal Culture as a Symptom/Sinthome
- Metamorphosis of the Ideals and the Actuals: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan and the Transplantation of Justice in British India
- The Churchyard in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Issues of Madness and Illegitimacy
- The Gothic Picturesque Garden and the Historical Sense
- Sovereignty, Faith and the Fall
- Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty
- Gollum's Sacredness and the Geopolitics of the Self: Reframing Tolkien's Normative World
- Culture, Language and Environmental Rights: The Anthropocentrism of English
- Finding The Guilty One: Media Sensationalism, Defendant's Performance, and Jury Equity
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Book Review
